24 Days and Counting

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John McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate 23 days ago. Since then, Ms. Palin has not held a single news conference with the national media….Meanwhile, Mr. McCain, who once referred to the media as his base, has himself become inaccessible. He promised to hold weekly news conferences as president but has not held a news conference as a candidate in more than a month. A candidate who stiffs the media on the campaign trail isn’t likely to perform better once in office.

It’s really pretty amazing. Can they get away with it? Or will the press eventually succumb to Steve Schmidt’s comical bleatings about how unfair everyone is being to John and Sarah? Wait and see!

And speaking of comical bleatings, it seems that conservatives are finally coming out of their fetal crouch on the Wall Street mess and going on the offensive, desperately trying out new and innovative ways to convince America that a financial crisis brought on by deregulation is the fault of — yes! — Democrats. Fannie Mae! CRA! Sarbanes-Oxley! They’d probably toss in repeal of Glass-Steagall just for the hell of it if it hadn’t been quite so obviously the brainchild of McCain’s consensus future secretary of the Treasury. Their campaign to alter reality isn’t working so far, which gives me renewed faith in the common sense of the American public, but I don’t expect them to stop trying. By this time next week they’ll be blaming the fact that FDR screwed around with the price of gold in 1933.

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